Poetry, Tea and Creativity

Poetry, Tea and Creativity

In ancient Greek, the word poet means ‘one who creates‘ and I have always taken a creative approach to poetry – trying to present it in original ways that will delight and inspire others. Some of these ways have included The Poetree, I’ll Eat My Words range of edible poetry, Word M’art featuring poems in a tin, Phone a Poem and Poetry Bingo. The latest idea has been Poetry Postie where I deliver poetic inspiration to the Nation (please see website below for more details of all these) and as part of this project I visited Japan last year for a cultural exchange. Whilst I was there I was lucky enough to be invited to a tea ceremony and I was struck by the fact that it was very different from our traditional British afternoon tea and yet at the heart of both traditions was the theme of celebration – whether that was the celebration of spirit, a person or occasion. It was a stopping of time – a chance to be in the moment and this is something that creativity has always allowed me to do. To be at one with the present and feel its flow. I was keen to provide a creative workshop setting where this feeling could be explored – where poetry could both be celebrated and touch upon the spiritual. Thus the idea for CreativiTEA was born.

At the CreativiTEA workshop you will be able to design edible poetry cakes and explore your own writing, with both my own help and that of Hiroshi Taniuchi, our award winning visiting poet from Japan. His focus will be on haiku and mine will be on stories, poetry and song. As a way of celebration we will design poetry cakes and make our own PinARTa to be filled with our work, poetic objets d’art and art sweets. As a finale to the work shop we will bash the PinARTa to further release our creativity!

The sessions aim to be fun (as Einstein says “Creativity is intelligence having fun “) but they also aim to touch upon the deeper spiritual questions that writing and creativity can help us to answer.